Laura and I have been promising ourselves an adventure for months. This past week, we took that adventure. We had two goals: We set out to see the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, which is maybe two hours east of our home here in Redmond. And we aimed to see the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, along with a segment of the old trail itself. That’s about five hours east of here.
We had several other goals, as well – these included being well-fed and well-lodged. We were not wholly successful in achieving those goals. But I’ll get to that. First, this: Please click on the thumbnail photos in order to view them fullsize.
The John Day National Monument is composed of five units. We visited just two. Our first stop was at the Painted Hills unit. And spectacular these hills are. They are composed of layers of volcanic ash, debris and chemicals deposited over about 40 million years. 
The unit is small, just about a mile square. But it contains stark, amazing beauty – wide, near-horizontal swaths of color decorate these hills, as if some giant, god-like artist took a swipe at these hills after dipping his/her brush into many colors of paint, rich reds, oranges, yellows and white.
And there’s buried treasure there.
These hills also are the home of many types of leaf fossils, though I’m sure you’d be prosecuted, shot, then skinned, for trying to find them. But in the overall story of the John Day Fossil Beds, these are small potatoes.
If it’s fossils you want, you have to go to the fossil center itself, a few miles down the road from the Painted Hills unit. Its real name is the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center and it’s located in what is called the Sheep Rock unit. It is spectacular.
According to what we learned there, a 10,000-square-mile chunk of Eastern Oregon is home to the most spectacular trove of prehistoric animals and plant fossils on the globe. The TCPC contains a vast collection of the fossilized remains of those organisms, documenting about 50 million years. It does it through large displays that explain at least seven paleontological eras evident at the site.
The differences between these eras are extreme, ranging from dry deserts to wet, sticky marshlands, to moderate savannas. Our takeaway from this is that Earth never has stopped changing and is changing still.
The fossils run the gamut from predators to prey, to mammals to reptiles to birds, to insects, to leaves, and to fruit, nuts and seeds. The variety is hard to take in.
Next stop was John Day itself, a former booming gold-rush town that now boasts 1,200 residents.
It was here that we got the first clue vis-à-vis dining. There were not many restaurants here. Hey, why would there be? This place is charming, sure, and it rests in a beautiful environment, but it’s tiny.
The solution? When in doubt in Oregon, repair to the nearest brew pub. It will offer pub grub, which usually is pretty good, and craft-brewed beer, which always is excellent. In this case, it was the 1188 Brew Pub. Not a mistake.
Our next stop was Baker City, about three hours east over mountainous roads. This is Oregon’s gold country. Gold is found in quartz, which is found in granite, which is found in mountainous upthrusts that are very different from the vulcanism that formed so much of the rest of Oregon. And these, the Elkhorn Mountains and the Blue Mountains, are real granite mountains, just like the Sierra Nevadas. So they hold gold.
Baker City, it turns out, was the center of Eastern Oregon’s gold rush, which occurred between the 1850s and the 1950s. This was by no means the equivalent of the California Gold Rush, but still it was significant enough for the merchants and bankers of Baker City to become rich.
That wealth today is reflected by a significant collection of magnificent stone buildings that line the town’s wide streets. Those streets today are very quiet, with a number of empty store fronts, signifying that the good times are past and gone. Still, it’s a very pretty little town. I hope that better times are coming.
Those better times would do well to burnish the Geiser Grand Hotel, on the city’s main street, where we spent three nights. Nice old place but to my mind, wanting a bit of a touch-up here and there, as well as some attention to detail.
Not least in the hotel restaurant. We dined there the first night. We vowed never to return. Second night, we hit a brew pub, with the expected satisfactory results. Third night, we hit a Mexican restaurant. It was bloody awful. So back to brew pubs.
We were in Baker City because of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, perhaps 10 miles east of town. What a treat that place is. It sits by itself atop a hill adjacent to the old trail, which remains baking in the sun and stretching into the east and west distance, as it has for 175 years. 
The center contains a series of dioramas featuring beautifully realized life-size displays showing pioneers of all ilk during imagined snapshot moments of their trip from Independence, Missouri, the trail’s beginning, to Oregon City, now a Portland suburb, where it ended. It includes trappers, teamsters, whites, Indians, oxen, horses, men, women, children. There also are displays of artifacts.
I think what we liked the most, however, was the hour-long film about life on the trail. This was not an easy trip. It took six months and basically cost everything the travelers had. And sometimes it cost more than that. It is said that the 2,000-mile-long trail is lined by an average of 80 graves per mile.
Mortality at this level seems a very high price to pay for the privilege of carving a new home, a new life, out of the Oregon wilderness, which was still many weeks away from this place.

Though choking dust no longer marks the passage of emigrants, the trail remains very well-marked. The steel wheels of thousands of wagons pounded, battered and packed the trail’s surface to the point where to this day, nothing grows in the trail’s ruts, so the trail remains easily visible. You can see it on Google Earth. Or you can go there, as Laura and I did, and walk on it for a short distance, kicking up our own dust. 
I’m mighty happy that I’m walking the trail now, rather than 150 years ago, when it would have been mighty hard to find a brew pub. Those were hard people. They had to be.
Sumpter, a dozen or so miles west of Baker City, contains two wonderful echoes of the gold rush. They are the Sumpter Railroad
and the Sumpter Dredge. We found the railroad yards deserted. Seasonal tourists gone, the operation is mostly closed at this time of year. All the better to wander, allowing ourselves to be led by our curiosities.

Same with the dredge, which still floats in a pond that it dug for itself. This thing was built in 1935 and operated – basically eating wide swaths of the valley surface in which it sits – until 1953. The damage is so immense, and so permanent, that you can find the dredge’s damage easily visible on Google Earth just to the south of Sumpter. It is not a positive testament to the greed of men. 
Our final stop was Joseph, a high-mountain arts/ranching community in the Wallowa Mountains, said to be Oregon’s alps, about two hours north and east of Baker City. It’s a cute little town with a couple of high-quality galleries, plus the foundry in which the bronze art contained in those galleries is cast using the lost wax method.
I’m still not sure I understand how that works, but I now have a much better idea, having taken the factory tour, which happens only at 11 am, just as the workers are about to take their lunch break. It’s worth doing. 
So is a lunch break. Having learned our lesson, which is basically that the boondocks of Eastern Oregon is no country for epicureans, we again hit the local brew pub, then checked in to the Belle Pepper Bed & Breakfast, which is contained in a nicely restored old home on one of Joseph’s side streets. Nice place. But they sure do keep the place cold. And if you are not ready to have breakfast at 8:30 am, you don’t get breakfast.
Dinner that night was at the Wallowa Lodge, adjacent to Wallowa Lake,
prime fishing water and also, at its north end, the burial place of Chief Joseph, chief of the Nez Perce. Who apparently were not treated well by the U.S. Government. But tell me, which tribe was? And thus do we have America’s original sin.
But now, except for a quick stop at the woolen mills in Pendleton, the trip is over. We opt for the easy way home, much of the way on Interstate 84. Man, this is gorgeous country. It makes me very happy to call Oregon our home, and to be so situated that a wonderful adventure is just a few hours away from home base. That said, however, home remains the best place of all. Plus, the food is the best!
-JFT